FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT DUTCH OVEN - PAGE 5

Here's almost everything you need to know about cooking, cleaning and working with cast iron. Cast iron is good for: High-heat cooking, "things like home-fried potatoes and pan-fried steaks, things that you want to get really hot that have a lot of flavor already, I mean," says Mary Risley, director of Tante Marie's Cooking School in San Francisco, "you can get a cast-iron pan on a hot stove-red hot. Tin-lined copper will bubble. The enamel and stainless steel just don`t get that hot. So if you want a really high heat, cast iron's the best."

My love of soup-and-sandwich combos goes back to the days when my mom was packing my lunch. Her version was a study in kitchen economy: She could turn any kind of leftover -- meatloaf, grilled fish, pork chops -- into a sandwich. And any cooked vegetable was fair game for one of her soups. In that spirit, my recipes this week offer a soup/sandwich combo that can be made in quantity, then reheated to eat later. The beet and carrot soup -- inspired by glowing fresh beets in the farmers market -- is a vegetarian dish that can be seasoned simply with salt and pepper or tailored to your taste by adding your favorite spice or herb.

There are many family recipes handed down for stuffed cabbage, and Helen Kern, of Oak Park has shared her mother's recipe with us. Cabbage sizes vary significantly, so it's hard to determine the exact amount of meat mixture needed. If you buy a small head, cut the meat mixture in half, or freeze the remaining mixture for a later time. Make these a day ahead if needed; the rolls reheat beautifully in the microwave. If you have a favorite original recipe you would like to share, send it to Good Eating.

Introductions are in order. In this dish, you'll meet wild rice, first harvested in the United States by Native Americans, and basmati rice, much prized in India for thousands of years. Both are wonders of the culinary world. Wild rice was considered a gift from the Great Spirit, the Creator himself, and basmati, a Sanskrit word, definitely lives up to its translation, "the fragrant one. " Wild rice and basmati rice come to us practically straight from nature. Wild rice, the seed of grasses now primarily grown in farm paddy fields, is never refined.

With cooler days here, soup will head the menu more often. Here are some tips for making soup making easier and faster: - When cooking dried beans, you don`t have to soak them overnight. Rinse and drain them. Then combine the beans with water in a Dutch oven. Bring to boiling; reduce heat and simmer 2 minutes. Remove from heat. Cover and let stand 1 hour. Drain off the soaking liquid and add fresh water and other ingredients. - Lentils and split peas do not need to be soaked.

Seasoning cast iron ensures tasty food. Here's how to make the classic black pans nonstick: Brush all surfaces that will touch food with a flavorless cooking oil. Then add enough oil to measure 1/4-inch deep in the pan and heat 1 hour in a 300-degree oven. Cool, pour off any remaining oil, and wipe with a paper towel. Cleaning methods, however, are debated. In "The Well-Tooled Kitchen" by Fred Bridge and Jean F. Tibbets, the authors recommend that, after cooking, you wash a cast-iron pan with soap and hot water but do not scour it. Dry thoroughly.

We think of tomatoes being at their best "in season," as we do apples or strawberries or sweet corn. But potatoes grown commercially in Idaho? Yes. To everything there is a season. In the same way that homegrown potatoes have a more intensely "potato" taste, freshly harvested russet baking potatoes are tastier too, even when we're talking 5.6 million tons produced by 1,900 Idaho farmers annually. Or you could count the company of thousands of visitors on a recent weekend here near Idaho Falls in the southeastern corner of the state.